Direct API pricing comparison
Grok 4.5 vs Grok 4.3
Compare current direct API token prices and estimated monthly workload costs for Grok 4.5 and Grok 4.3.
2direct models
Pricing only.Grok 4.3 is cheaper in 4 of 4 comparable standard workload presets below. This is a pricing comparison only; it does not rank model quality.
| Model | Input | Cached | Output | Context | Max output | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Grok 4.5xAI · Direct API | $2 | $0.3 | $6 | 500K | — | Direct ↗ |
Grok 4.3xAI · Direct API | $1.25 | $0.2 | $2.5 | 1M | — | Direct ↗ |
Same workload, different API bill
These four presets use 30 active days, standard direct rates, no retries, no reasoning-token add-on, no cache writes, and the cached-input percentage shown in each row.
| Standard workload | Grok 4.5 | Grok 4.3 | Lower monthly estimate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chat10,000/day · 2,000 in · 500 out · 25% cached | $1,845 | $967.5 | Grok 4.3 by $877.5 / mo |
| Coding2,000/day · 12,000 in · 1,800 out · 55% cached | $1,414.8 | $754.2 | Grok 4.3 by $660.6 / mo |
| Agent1,200/day · 32,000 in · 2,500 out · 65% cached | $1,571.04 | $878.76 | Grok 4.3 by $692.28 / mo |
| Documents400/day · 180,000 in · 2,000 out · 15% cached | $3,913.2 | $2,419.8 | Grok 4.3 by $1,493.4 / mo |
The main calculator includes batch mode, long-context rules, retries, reasoning tokens, cache writes, and other model-specific pricing logic that a static comparison cannot fully capture.